Departure(s)

Julian Barnes tells us that this is his final book, so that’s one departure accounted for – the last instalment of a writing career spanning 45 years, encompassing novels and short stories, memoirs and essays, biography, travel writing, translation and even a little pseudonymous detective fiction. Many of these works turn up here, whether obliquely or overtly, referred to through subject matter, style, tone or connotation; in the contemporary cultural argot, which Barnes is fond of examining, these writerly winks might be known as Easter eggs. Alex Clark, The Guardian

Departure(s) by Julian Barnes is published by Jonathan Cape. 

triste! 

The Banality of Kindness

In the summer of 1944, a young Tony Molho was riding with his mother on a train in Thessaloniki, Greece. Suddenly, two officers in plain clothes boarded and began to ask for everyone’s papers. Molho’s mother, who had recently returned from her escape of Nazi persecution, acted quickly, passing Molho’s little hand to that of a man standing beside them. The train stopped, and she jumped off. 

Such are the stories detailed in Molho’s memoir, Courage and Compassion: A Jewish Boyhood in German-Occupied Greece, released in the U.S. last June. The book, first published in Greek in 2023 under the title The Banality of Kindness, won the Academy of Athens’s Ouranis Prize. Rebecca Goodman, Brown Alumni Magazine

questo memoriale è uscito anche in Italia presso Viella con il titolo La gentilezza degli altri. Un bambino ebreo nella Grecia occupata. Il nome di Tony Molho mi richiama, per omonimia, quello dell’affascinante Renata Molho, che conobbi anni fa: esperta di moda, autrice di un giallo ambientato nella Milano della moda e di una biografia di Armani. La cito volentieri, in ricordo di Armani.

Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?

Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant? è il titolo del libro di Roz Chast (Bloombury USA); un libro di memorie sugli ultimi anni dei genitori. Molto toccante, spiritoso, ovviamente, e liberatorio. Sarah Lyall intervista la cartoonist nella sua casa a Ridgefield, Conn., dove, in un closet tiene le ceneri dei genitori. “I like having my parents in my closet,” is how she explains it in her new graphic novel, “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?”, which chronicles the pair’s long, precipitous decline, starting from when her mother fell off a stepladder in 2005 to the time she died, in 2009 (Ms. Chast’s father died in the middle of all that). “I think it makes a nice home for them". E poi racconta altre cose interessanti e divertenti della sua vita. nyt.

Top 10 Father Memoirs

Negli Stati Uniti e in Gran Bretagna la festa del papà si celebra il terzo sabato di giugno: quest’anno il 15 giugno. In onore di questo giorno Andre Gerard, autore di Fathers: A Literary Anthology (Patremoir Press, 2011), ha pubblicato un post sul Books blog del Guardian sui dieci memoriali più significativi sulla figura paterna. Molto interessante. Non ne conosco neanche uno, nemmeno quello di Philip Roth, che si intitola Patrimony: A True Story (tradotto in Italia nel 2007 da Einaudi), e che è la narrazione della morte del padre a causa di un tumore al cervello. Lo andrò subito a cercare. Di esso Gerard dice, "While Patrimony's title hints at a postmodern game, there is nothing playful about the clear-eyed, plain-spoken integrity with which Philip Roth observes his father's dying and remembers his father's life. The father lives on in the "modest no-frills style", and the book is remarkable as a strong tribute paid by a strong son to a strong father". guardian.

On Memory

Oliver Sacks parla del funzionamento della memoria e dello scrivere memoriali. "In 1993, approaching my sixtieth birthday, I started to experience a curious phenomenon—the spontaneous, unsolicited rising of early memories into my mind, memories that had lain dormant for upward of fifty years. Not merely memories, but frames of mind, thoughts, atmospheres, and passions associated with them—memories, especially, of my boyhood in London before World War II. Moved by these, I wrote two short memoirs ... I think a more general autobiographical impulse was stimulated, rather than sated, by these brief writings, and late in 1997, I launched on a three-year project of writing a memoir of my boyhood, which I published in 2001 as Uncle Tungsten. ... I accepted that I must have forgotten or lost a great deal, but assumed that the memories I did have—especially those that were very vivid, concrete, and circumstantial—were essentially valid and reliable; and it was a shock to me when I found that some of them were not". nybooks.

Zoë Heller on Salman Rushdie

Rushdie in 1988

Zoë Heller pubblica sul New York Book Review un'affilatissima critica all'ultimo libro di Salman Rushdie, il memoriale scritto in terza persona, Joseph Anton. Tanto da meritarsi The Best Hatchet Job of 2012 (Hatchet Job of the Year is a crusade against dullness, deference and lazy thinking. It rewards critics who have the courage to overturn received opinion, and who do so with style. Most of all, it is a public celebration of that most underpaid and undervalued form of journalism: the book review).
Assolutamente da leggere. Ecco quel che dice, tra le altre cose, "At various points, Rushdie seems to grow tired of defending the special rights of fiction and moves on to advocating for the extra-special rights of serious, or important, fiction. “He hoped for, he often felt he needed, a more particular defense like the quality defense made in the case of other assaulted books, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Ulysses, Lolita….”
One is struck here, not just by the implied disregard for the free speech of other writers who might not qualify for “the quality defense,” but also by the lordly nonchalance with which Rushdie places himself alongside Lawrence, Joyce, and Nabokov in the ranks of literary merit. Throughout this memoir, Rushdie claims kinship with any number of great literary men—men who, like him, suffered for their genius, but whose fame was destined to outlast that of their oppressors ..." nybooks.

Crazy U

Entrare in un college in America è un'impresa epica, che coinvolge l'intera famiglia per parecchi mesi. Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College (Simon & Schuster)  di Andrew Ferguson la descrive in maniera molto divertente. Alla fine il figlio viene accettato in un college, viene accompagnato dai genitori malinconici, e dopo qualche giorno telefona a casa piuttosto preoccupato. Si trova nella lavanderia, spiega Ferguson, e "Which goes in the hot water, colored stuff or white stuff?" chiede al padre. "Mom told me and now I can't remember. . . And nobody here seems to know either." wp.

Dirty Life

Ho scelto il post di oggi per l'immagine di questa copertina. Sembra un quadro di Hopper. The Dirty Life. On Farming, Food, and Love di Kristin Kimball (Scribner). Kristin Kimball era una giornalista newyorkese, quando, nel 2003, ha avuto l'incarico di intervistare un agricoltore "molto alto e carismatico" che gestiva un'azienda agricola sostenibile Upstate New York. Si è innamorata, l'ha sposato e gli si è affiancata nel lavoro in fattoria. "As much as you transform the land by farming, farming transforms you. It seeps into your skin along with the dirt that abides permanently in the creases of your thickened hands, the beds of your nails. It asks so much of your body that if you’re not careful it can wreck you as surely as any vice by the time you’re fifty, when you wake up and find yourself with ruined knees and dysfunctional shoulders, deaf from the constant clank and rattle of your machinery, and broke to boot. But farming takes root in you and crowds out other endeavors, makes them seem paltry. Your acres become a world." newyorker.